Saturday, November 21, 2015

Though just about everyone thought Crusade — itself a title fraught with unintended
significances these days, given that to the West the term “Crusade” just
connotes a major struggle that mobilized a large number of people for an
idealistic end, to the Muslim world it’s a reminder of a genuine holy war once
waged by Christian Europe against Islam and a word used by Muslim terrorists
eager to portray themselves as heroes in a millennial “clash of civilizations”
with Christian nations — was inferior to Babylon 5 (the people at the screening thought so, as did the
critics at the time, the imdb.com reviewers and the TV audience, since its
ratings were poor and it was canceled after just one season), I found it much
more profound and moving. At least part of that was due to its plot
similarities to the entire “war on terror” in general and its most recent
battlefront — the November 13 attacks in Paris by groups either part of or
associated with or allegiance to (the lines between those relationships do get blurred) Islamic State, sometimes known as ISIS
(Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) or ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the
Levant) or DAESH (which is apparently a transliteration of their initials in
the Arabic alphabet and can also be “bent” in its pronunciation to sound like
an Arabic slur). The plot of Crusade,
which was apparently outlined in a special two-hour episode of Babylon
5 called “A Call to Arms” which was
presented as a TV-movie, is that an alien race called the Drakh mounted an
all-out assault on Earth, intending to conquer it. Their spaceships were
vanquished and they retreated, but they left behind a genetically engineered
plague virus that, once it learns how to infect earth organisms — a process
Earth’s scientists have figured will take about five years — will destroy all
life on Earth.

As a result, Earth itself has been placed under quarantine, and
with Earth seemingly under a microbiological death sentence anyway, a number of
apocalyptic religious cults have sprung up. They have their disagreements with
each other but all subscribe to the deep-ecological notion that humans had
become a pestilence on Earth even before the attack and the virus is
actually a judgment from God that people have screwed up so badly everyone and
everything on the planet needs to die. The two episodes of this very
interesting show that were presented last night were the series opener, “War
Zone,” and the eighth one, “Ruling from the Tomb.” The gimmick is that while
the colony of Earth scientists on Mars are desperately researching the Drakh
plague and seeking to find a cure within the five-year (literal) deadline,
Earth authorities have also sent out a spaceship called the Excalibur and recruited hotshot space-fleet officer Captain
Matthew Gideon (Gary Cole) to captain her. I’ve had a hot crush on Gary Cole
since I saw him not long ago in a Lifetime TV-movie called Lies He
Told, made in 1997 (two years before Crusade), in which he played an ex-Air Force servicemember
who was using his special operations training to support himself by robbing
banks, and he’d married (bigamously) to a woman so naïve she kept believing his
more and more preposterous explanations about where his money was coming from
and what he was doing when he set off and disappeared for days or weeks on end.
(That’s a major part of the Lifetime iconography: just about any genuinely hot male on one of their shows turns out
to be a villain!) The opening fistfight insisted on by the “suits” at TNT takes
place between Gideon and a group of young crew members who attempt to mutiny on
his previous ship, and whom he of course subdues easily through what appears to
be a combination of upper-body strength and the sheer force of his star
personality. Since the ringleader of the mutiny, and the participant Gideon
personally slugged, was the son of a prominent Senator in the Interplanetary
Federation (or whatever it’s called in this fictional universe), when Gideon is
summoned to Mars he thinks it’s to get a dressing-down.

Instead it’s to get a
promotion to command the Excalibur,
a ship that’s 1.3 miles long (though that’s nothing compared to the one in Babylon
5, which was five miles long), whose mission it will be to hunt down
the Drakh and see if they can either capture one alive or find out enough
information that they will be able to help the scientists on Mars cure the
plague and save all life on Earth. Gideon asks if he’ll be able to select his
own crew and he’s told he’ll be able to pick some of them but not all — “We’ve
had to make a lot of compromises to get this thing off the ground,” he’s told,
in what one imdb.com “Trivia” poster said might be an allusion to what J.
Michael Straczynski went through trying to get the series on the air — and in
particular he insists on carrying over his first mate from his previous
command, Lt. John Matheson (Daniel Dae Kim — why this obviously Asian actor is
playing a character with an Anglo last name is a mystery), and also he insists
on hiring Dureena Nafeel (Carrie Dobro), a member of the “Thieves’ Guild” who
persuades Gideon she’ll be a useful addition to his crew since she can hack any
security system and break into anything. In the opening episode the crew — including Dr. Sarah Chambers
(Marjean Holden), one of the crew members forced on Gideon by his superiors
(and an odd-looking woman who resembles Mick Jagger in drag) — encounter an
archaeological team on a planet on which a Drakh spaceship was forced to land
after an Earth attack. Gideon finds a couple of befuddled archaeologists, Max
Eilerson (David Allen Brooks), who has somehow managed to learn the Drakh
language and talks his way onto the Excalibur crew with that skill; and the much younger (and
hunkier) Trace Miller (Alex Mendoza, who in his later career apparently used
the name “Zeus Mendoza”). They also capture the captain of the Drakh vessel
that landed there, but he invokes the laws of war and refuses to talk — and
Gideon is too nice and too ethical to torture or “enhance” him. Overall, “War
Zone” was a good and provocative beginning for a series whose central premise
seemed to me to be a lot more compelling than Babylon 5, and which promised great things.